


Out of the Dark

by CatKing_Catkin



Series: Widomauk Week [6]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxious Caleb Widogast, Blood Drinking, Blood Magic, Body Horror, Caleb Widogast Needs a Hug, Crystals, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Escape, Established Relationship, Experimental Style, Friendship/Love, Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Mollymauk Tealeaf, Hopeful Ending, Hugs, Human Experimentation, Hurt Caleb Widogast, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Imprisonment, Kidnapping, M/M, Magic Lessons, Mild Blood, Nonbinary Mollymauk Tealeaf, Panic Attacks, Past Abuse, Past Torture, Road Trips, Scars, Training, Unethical Experimentation, Warning: Trent Ikithon, class swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-23 00:08:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19139617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatKing_Catkin/pseuds/CatKing_Catkin
Summary: The darkness of the cellar grew suddenly brighter, and Caleb smiled to himself as he saw four orbs of soft golden light spinning throughout the room. “There’s so much you can do with just some dancing lights. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that. I don’t see how I could.”“I never did,” Caleb whispered, and he still felt a pang of loss in his chest at the words. But when Molly heard that pang in his voice and looked over at him with a soft frown on their face, he forced a smile. He did not begrudge Molly their magic, certainly not after all they’d endured to get it – or, more accurately, to have it forced on them. But Caleb wished so fiercely that it hadn’t worked out to be a trade.*  *  *Caleb and Mollymauk lose their old powers to Trent Ikithon's experiments, but gain some new ones in exchange. Even after they escape together, they have to take some time to figure out what life is going to be like from now on.(Written for Widomauk Week 2019, Day 6, prompt "Class Swap/Role Reversal")





	Out of the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Somewhat based on an RP I had with a cool Caleb on Dreamwidth!

“You’re a good teacher, you know that?”

They were each sprawled out flat on their backs on the floor of the basement. The air was chill, making the sweat dry quickly on his forehead, along his arms and down his stomach. It felt bracing as Caleb sucked in great heaving lungfuls of it, feeling his muscles burn. He realized dimly that the cuts had already closed up, at least. Maybe one day that would stop seeming so impossibly strange.

“You sound surprised,” was all he said out loud, as he lifted an arm to examine the two new silvery scars dotting his skin.

Molly huffed out a soft laugh. “Maybe I am. A little. And not just because I know for a fact that I’m a terrible student. I get bored _so_ easily.”

“I don’t think that will be much of a problem now.”

“You know, I think you’re right.” The darkness of the cellar grew suddenly brighter, and Caleb smiled to himself as he saw four orbs of soft golden light spinning throughout the room. “There’s _so_ much you can do with just some dancing lights. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that. I don’t see how I _could_.”

“I never did,” Caleb whispered, and he still felt a pang of loss in his chest at the words. He doubted that would ever entirely fade, either. But when Molly cleared heard that pang in his voice and looked over at him with a soft frown on their face, Caleb forced a smile. He did not begrudge Molly their magic, certainly not after all they’d endured to get it – or, more accurately, to have it forced on them. But Caleb wished so fiercely that it hadn’t worked out to be a _trade_.

That trade had gotten them out of Trent’s lab together. It had kept them alive. But now, as they tried to track down the friends who were no doubt still trying to track down the two of them, Caleb didn’t know how he was _really_ supposed to carry on and make himself at all useful.

One way, he knew, was in teaching Molly to control their new powers. Especially in the early days, the tiefling’s control had been shoddy and scattershot. They’d been frightened of their new magic and its tendency to flare up wildly alongside the stabs of pain from their arms. There’d been a need to avoid towns for the first few days just to make sure Molly didn’t set anyone or any buildings on fire. Even now, the skin of their forearms was blackened and scarred beneath the bandages they’d finally secured.

But whenever Caleb helped them change the bandages and reapply the salve, he fancied he could still see the long, thin scars standing out lividly, marking where each crystal shard had been inserted ever-so-carefully beneath Molly’s skin.

They hurt. Caleb knew they hurt. Molly tried to downplay how much they hurt and, after all, Molly had always been a being with a strangely intimate relationship with pain, at times seeming to welcome it as a lover or an old friend. It was quite possible that the pain truly wasn’t quite as excruciating for them as Caleb remembered it being, even if there were still times when they visibly, violently flared up, worse than what even Molly’s preternatural resistance could bear. But then again, Molly’s body hadn’t rejected the crystals as Caleb’s had. Something about the strange blood magic inside of them had mixed and merged with it, annihilating their old powers and granting them these new ones.

_The process had left them feverish and weak, prone to hallucinations and babbling, and yet in the same breath they’d also been prone to breaking out in fits of giggling laughter, as if rather than being kept in a cage in a basement they’d simply overindulged on a night in a tavern common room. Rather than reassuring Caleb, it had only worried him more and more by the day. Molly hadn’t looked like a person overcoming or mastering their pain. They’d looked like someone subsumed by it, right on the verge of drowning, down so deep that they’d forgotten there was anything to life but pain and adapted accordingly._

_Not that any of that had made a difference to Trent, of course. Molly had still been dragged from their cage at the same time every evening. Trent Ikithon was nothing if not punctual and methodical, after all, and Caleb knew he would continue to put Molly through every possible battery of tests to confirm his findings and quantify every step of the process, no matter what state Molly was left in at the end. Even if Molly seemed to be well past noticing their increasingly weakened, broken, wounded state, Caleb’s perfect memory cataloged every detail and fresh wound every time Molly was dumped back through the open cage door._

_Caleb, meanwhile, had quickly driven himself half-mad with the desperate need to do something to help his friend and his utter inability to do anything. His own magic had been gone by then, sealed away with a curse woven tight around him by Astrid which still made fireworks of pain explode behind his eyes and light up every nerve every time he tried to cast so much as a cantrip. Somehow, at least while they’d been down there, the fact that they’d been put in separate cages had seemed an even more cruel state of affairs. Most nights he’d just tried to keep talking to Molly, trying to keep them grounded, trying to keep them here._

_Sometimes, he’d even been able coax his friend to slip their arm through the bars and stretch it across the floor between their cages so Caleb could do the same and hold their hand._

_Even so, it had all felt so terribly useless. So when, one night, Molly had started talking about a way he could help Caleb, a way to give him back his powers, of course Caleb had listened intently. Though Molly’s voice had remained weak and slurred, their words had been surprisingly coherent and detailed. Or maybe it had simply been that Caleb had gone without food or water for two days by then after losing his wits at one point and trying to fight being removed from his own cage. Maybe that was why, when Molly had torn open their palm with their teeth and held their bleeding hand through the bars, everything they’d told Caleb to do had made perfect sense._

_He’d drank their blood and repeated the words Molly told him to repeat and the end result had been feeling like the familiar pain light up his limbs and joints and nerves, in addition to the newer pain of feeling as if his chest had just been gouged open._

_But of course, no one had bothered to come and investigate the screams. And when Caleb slowly, finally came back to himself, it had been to a dulled fire in his veins and the sight of Molly very unconscious. That fresh panic had left Caleb seized with an overwhelming urge to get to him, and in the next breath he’d been seized with the sudden, piercing knowledge that he could._

_He’d gouged open his palm on a jagged break in the stone floor. It should have been a surprise when fire bloomed from his hand, from his blood, hot enough to eventually melt the lock off his cage door without so much as singeing his flesh. Somehow, it hadn’t been a surprise at all._

_They’d been caught at the stairs out of the basement, but by then Molly had regained consciousness. And at the prospect of being put back in his cage, the tiefling had…cut loose. They’d very deliberately lost control, and the glow of the burning mansion had lit their way for a long while as the two of them had crashed out of it and made their hasty, graceless retreat through the woods._

“Caleb? Ready to get back to it?”

He heaved a sigh, but got back to his feet anyway, leaning on the quarterstaff for support as his body protested the movement. _“Ja._ Might as well.” He got into the position he’d been shown, and Molly did the same. No rites, not this time, not down here when it was just between them. He simply heard Molly counting under his breath – _one, two, three_ – and then the staff was coming at his head. Caleb blocked it, the _clack_ of wood echoing loudly in the enclosed space. The next blow came to his middle, then his legs, then a sharper jab aimed at his stomach and a swing at his head that he didn’t block and got lightly, chidingly rapped on the temple for.

Molly had freely admitted at the start that they weren’t much of a teacher, that they’d learned most everything they knew by remembering it, trusting to muscle memory that wasn’t theirs’. But they knew a few simple drills and calisthenics that they could run Caleb through again and again and again, trusting to repetition the same way that Caleb did when teaching Molly cantrips.

On and on they went, first running through drills and forms with the quarterstaffs, then cooling down with some stretches before doing calisthenics. They worked and trained even as the aches returned to Caleb’s limbs and he saw Molly starting to sweat through their shirt again. 

Even if he was planning to stick to using a crossbow under Nott’s eventual tutelage and still stay far back from any kind of melee danger, the fact remained that using these powers to their full effect would require that Caleb be stronger, tougher, more durable, lest he knock himself out from blood loss and self-inflicted weakness and share Molly’s fate from that awful morning on Glory Run Road. It had been mysteriously temporary in Molly’s case. Caleb had no faith that he would be so lucky should he make the same mistakes.

And really, Molly wasn’t a _bad_ teacher. They’d been doing this for long enough that Caleb was mostly assured of that. He’d felt some trepidation about placing himself in someone else’s power again in such a familiar way, even a friend, especially when there was a real risk of physical harm even if everything went well. But Molly was patient and kind - they never pushed Caleb past the point of exhaustion, never shamed him for getting exhausted. Even if they couldn’t do all the tricks they’d once been able to do with a pair of scimitars, they were quick and deft enough to notice when Caleb obviously wasn’t going to be able to block and pull their blow in time to avoid bruising. Those times when they didn’t were obviously accidents, and accidents did happen sometimes.

And even if they laughed sometimes when Caleb got tripped up, the hand they offered to help him up from the floor was always offered sincerely. That helped. That wasn’t nothing. And he was getting hit less and less, his energy reserves lasting longer and longer. Molly had even helpfully commented a few days ago that Caleb was starting to get some muscle in his shoulders, and Caleb had realized after feeling for himself that they hadn’t been joking.

The innkeeper came down after they were recovering from their third round of physical training with a fourth round of cantrip practice to tell them both to get out, the dinner rush would be starting soon. Molly thanked her with a bow, helped Caleb up, and together they headed up the stairs, ducked out of the kitchen, and took a table in the corner of the common room to wait until they could secure their own meal. Neither of them had more than a handful of coppers between them – they didn’t even technically have a room, they’d just been given a place in the hayloft of the stables in exchange for work. But at least meals had been included with that.

They dragged their chairs around so their backs were against the wall, then dragged their chairs together so Caleb could lean his head on Molly’s shoulder and relax a little more. He relaxed still further when he felt Molly’s tail twine around his waist, the gesture slight and barely noticeable to most but unmistakably protective to him.

Molly kept their hands busy shuffling the deck of playing cards they’d stolen two weeks ago. Caleb counted their meagre collection of coppers, stacking them into a tower or a pyramid, then did it again, letting the recitation of numbers in his mind soothe him. For both of them, it was just something to do, something to pass the time so they wouldn’t have to think too much. Neither of them said anything out loud while they waited. That wasn’t inherently unusual. With only the two of them on the road, with both of them well aware of each other’s anxieties and equally afraid to discuss them out loud, sometimes there wasn’t very much to say. But the silence was easy and comfortable by now, their own little bubble of safety in the midst of a chaotic, newly unfamiliar world. Already, even Caleb’s keen mind could barely remember a time when things had been any different between them.

When the two of them finally had their supper served up by a distracted serving girl, they gathered up the plates and cups in a precarious balancing act and started back towards the hayloft by unspoken agreement. As together they walked the short distance across the inn yard, through a world painted in blue and purple shadows by twilight, Caleb realized one other purpose the quiet rest had served. It had let his subconscious mull over the ideas he’d been struggling to say for days on end and finally, finally turn them into words he could say.

“I want to be a good teacher,” he said bluntly. Surprise at hearing him speak up so apparently suddenly made Molly falter a pace before they glanced back at him. Having the familiar warm glow of their eyes on him still made Caleb blush and falter, his gaze falling to his feet. “I want to be better than Trent.”

“You are,” Molly said softly. “In every way someone can be.”

The plate started to rattle faintly as Caleb’s hands started to shake. With an effort, he willed them still for just a little while longer. But even then, he found himself suddenly rooted to the spot, forced to squeeze his eyes shut, because facing what was around him as well as what was inside of him was suddenly _too much_.

“I, I mean it,” he stammered, and was humiliated to hear that his voice had gone high and tight like he was about to cry. “I d-don’t want to treat you as he treated us but, but he is the only example I _have_ , so I just try to do the opposite in every case but I don’t know if that is _enough_ —”

“Caleb.” Their voice was gentle but firm. Caleb still trembled as he heard their footsteps drawing near, as he felt the plate and the cup carefully taken out of his hands and settled onto the ground. Then he bit back a sob as he felt them wrap their arms around him, gently guiding his head to rest on their shoulder. “It is. I promise you, it is. You’ve taught me so much already.”

“It’s just, I want you to love magic. For its own sake. I don’t want you to have to _learn_ to love it because it’s all you have. I don’t want you to _need_ it like I do. Did.” The correction tasted like bile in the back of his throat. His eyes burned and his throat hurt. “I know I am talking nonsense, Molly, but this is _important_. Do you understand? Please, please do not ever let me push you how he pushed us. Don’t ever let me forget. _Please_.”

“Oh, Caleb.” He felt a kiss pressed to his forehead. Molly’s lips were dry and chapped from their earlier exertion, from the fact that they hadn’t even had the chance to stop and take a drink yet. Caleb didn’t care. That kiss was _everything_. “ _Mo chroi_. I promise. I’ll watch you until you trust yourself enough to see that you don’t need it. All right?”

Caleb giggled, weak and wet. Then he was finally able to force his eyes open and meet Molly’s gaze, was able to make his hands move enough to reach up, cradle Molly’s face in his hands, and draw him closer for a proper kiss. It was slow and sweet and cleansing as the first taste of rain had been on their first night away from the mansion.

“Good,” he whispered, when they both pulled away to breathe. “Good. _Ich liebe dich.”_

_“Mo anam cara.”_

Trauma and fear, pain and violation, they all changed a person in indelible, inescapable ways. But compared to the fresh scars he carried from their time together in the basement, this particular change, the knowledge of how nice it felt to be close to Molly, seemed almost like a blessing in comparison.

That seemed like the sort of way Molly might think, too. Picking the good out of the bad. Finding solace in hell. Maybe they would have always found their way to this _place_ together, but at least they _had_ gotten to it, and they could make sure they were both stronger for it as they moved forward and figured out what their life was going to be like from now on.

But all of that could be thoughts and plans for tomorrow. For now, Caleb simply focused on gathering up his supper again and following Molly into the stables and up to the hayloft. They ate a simple but filling meal, and really, exhaustion could make even the plainest food taste rich and delicious. Then they curled up together in their makeshift bed and were asleep within moments, looking forward to another day of hunting up leads come morning.

*  *  *

Their first lead came much earlier than either of them could have hoped. When Caleb awoke, it took him only a second or two in order to realize that about five and a half hours had passed. It was technically the following day, but in that hazy space between “late and night” and “early in the morning” where the darkness was only just starting to ease.

He wasn’t sure what had woken him – all was quiet, Molly was still snoring beside him, their tail twitching faintly as they dreamed. But he had the strangest feeling as if someone had just shaken him awake.

Then he recognized the feeling for what it truly was – the phantom sensation of someone taking an indrawn breath before casting a Sending spell. He recognized the feeling for what it was a scant second before Jester’s voice whispered in his ears from unknowable miles away.

_“Caleb? Hi. I’m sorry it’s been a while since I’ve tried to message you. It’s been hard to hold on to spells. But we got—”_

Caleb lay there, scarcely daring to breathe, scarcely daring to believe he’d really just heard what he thought he had. Maybe it had been a hallucination, a half-awake dream. The two of them had been trapped beneath Trent’s wards for so long, of course she would have given up trying to Send, except this was _Jester_ so _of course_ she would never give up hope for long.

And his own hopes were rewarded when another sending came. Caleb sat up and hastily started to shake Molly awake as her voice spoke in his ear. “ _We got lucky and today was pretty okay! So I figured I’d try to check on you and Molly? Miss you. Respond if possible.”_

“Jester,” Caleb whispered, and Molly’s eyes went from half-open and groggy to wide and lucid in an instant. For his part, Caleb was suddenly smiling so fiercely that it hurt. “We miss you. We are free. We are in a town called Staddle. Very far west. Trying to find you. We’ll talk more tomorrow night.”

He thought to himself, as Molly caught him in a hug and an overjoyed kiss, that the two of them really would have a lot of questions to answer when they were finally reunited with their team. Once the celebrations and the welcomes had passed, there would be so much to discuss.

But here and now, he didn’t care. He refused to be ashamed of any of the answers he and Molly would have to give. The two of them had survived, and survived together, and that was all that mattered.


End file.
